ECMWF is a Co-ordinated International Organisation with 23 Member and 12 Co-operating States situated  in and around Europe (opens in a new tab). The Centre was established 50 years ago to bring together resources and expertise from several countries to address jointly the challenging objective of forecasting the weather beyond 3 to 5 days – this is what “medium-range” means in our name. This is a time range that is particularly useful for organising early action in the case of extreme weather events. ECMWF has been spearheading over the past decades what is sometimes called the “quiet revolution” of  numerical weather prediction (opens in a new tab), which has seen the gradual improvement of the skill of forecasts. 

We are both a research institute and a 24/7 operational service, producing global numerical weather predictions and other data for our Member and Co-operating States, and the broader community. We operate a world-class supercomputer facility for weather forecasting and hold one of the largest meteorological archives with now over one exabyte of data – yes, it’s one billion gigabytes! Other strategic activities include delivering advanced training and assisting the World Meteorological Organization in implementing its programmes.

ECMWF also plays a key role in Copernicus, the Earth Observation component of the European Union’s Space programme, offering quality-assured information on climate change ( Copernicus Climate Change Service, C3S (opens in a new tab)), atmospheric composition (Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service,  CAMS (opens in a new tab)), and flooding and fire danger (Copernicus Emergency Management Service,  CEMS (opens in a new tab)). And through the EU's Destination Earth initiative, we are developing prototype digital twins  of the Earth (opens in a new tab).

ECMWF staff and activities are distributed over three sites: the headquarters are located in Reading (UK), our data centre is located in Bologna (Italy) and, of course, we have offices in Bonn. The ECMWF Bonn site was selected in December 2020 as part of an international competition, which selected the Bonn/German offer led by the BMDV. A key strength of the offer was certainly the vibrant ecosystem of International Organisations and internationally recognised research entities -- particularly the University of Bonn, the University of Cologne, and the Research Centre Jülich. The three have formed the Center for Earth System Observation and Computational Analysis ( CESOC (opens in a new tab)) to stimulate and facilitate collaborations with ECMWF. We’re also not far from Offenbach, the headquarters of the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), with which we work very closely.

The first ECMWF staff arrived in Bonn in August 2021 and we are now well over 200 people from all over Europe working on different areas of work of the Centre: Research, Forecasts and Services, Computing, and Administration. You’ll find the whole range of our jobs represented in Bonn: not only scientists and engineers, but also finance officers, HR specialists, communications experts, lawyers and user support staff. However, Bonn is the centre of gravity of the activities that we operate on behalf of the European Commission, particularly Copernicus and Destination Earth. In particular, the management of the Services are working in Bonn as well as the staff overseeing all the contracts that we issue in this context.

We are actively working with partners in the region. On the academic side, colleagues from ECMWF, CESOC and DWD have several ongoing collaborations, and we regularly organise joint workshops and seminars. We also have a programme managed by DWD for  early-career research fellows (opens in a new tab) who are working on specific topics of mutual interest; recently, we had the launch event for the second cohort of four fellows. We are also actively engaging with several international organisations including UN-SPIDER, UNU/EHS, WHO, IRENA and UNFCCC. The data and information products that ECMWF generates or brokers about weather, climate and environment support many policy areas including adaptation and mitigation, renewable energy and disaster risk reduction, so this makes a lot of sense to leverage our geographic proximity for common good.

ECMWF is turning 50 this year and we are organising one week of events in each of our duty stations. This begins in Bonn in the week starting 7 April, with a number of workshops and a whole-week seminar on the theme “Forecasting in a Changing Climate”. The week in Bologna will be in September, focusing on our users, but also on our technology with the biennial workshop on high-performance computing. Finally, the week in Reading will be in early December and will particularly look into machine learning, especially on the joint activities we have with the national meteorological services of our Member States.

We are delighted to have been chosen by the city of Bonn as the International Organisation of the Year 2025. This is indeed a great opportunity for us to be better known beyond our usual audiences. In turn, we plan to bring our contribution to consolidating Bonn as an international hub for climate and sustainable development. In this context, and besides the 50th anniversary week in April, we will organise or co-organise further events in the city. We will also participate in the “Summer of Change” and the “SDG Days” and some of our staff will join the “Zero Hunger Run”. At the end of the year, we will host at the World Conference Centre the  5th EU Clean Air Forum (opens in a new tab),, which is a high-level event about clean air in Europe and will involve European officials and representatives from across the EU.

We are currently hosted in the BMUV building on Robert-Schuman-Platz, where we enjoy excellent facilities. But an important aspect of the Bonn/German offer for hosting ECMWF’s duty station was the development of a dedicated building under the responsibility of the BMDV. The first stone of this building was laid  in June last year (opens in a new tab) and, if you go past the edge of the Rheinaue Park, you may see the works that are now in progress. The building will include a glass tower similar to UNFCCC’s “climate tower” and a large conferencing facility. The plan is to move to the new building in the middle of 2027. This will really complete the integration of ECMWF in the Bonn landscape!